Science

this guy was a co-author of "The coddling of the american mind" which is just a reactionary screed about campus culture (have blue haired libs gone to far?). Here's a podcast that goes into the book https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/id1651876897?i=1000603422829

In this article, he's literally advocating for following the examples set by Utah and Florida with regards to kids and social media. And yes, he's one of those "social contagion" idiots https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/jonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs

It is extremely irresponsible to give your minor a smart phone and social media, but the majority of parents do it anyways, I dont get why its happening.

It is all about the phones, not systemic issues that surround teenagers. But those pesky phones, and the apps surrounding them.

this isn't a scientific article, it's an opinion piece. why is it here?

I remember when video games were the root of all evil.

Its not good for adults either.

Why does this have to be a two sides thing? Is this underpinned by the culture war bullshit? I can't tell and I can't be assed to deep dive into every spat to untangle all the reading between the lines.

I'm surprised they found that there is no evidence that using these platforms is "rewiring" children’s brains. Wasn't it shown that social media companies base pretty much their entire technical decision making on psychologically conditioning not just children's brains but everyone who uses it? So the evidence now shows that these are benign after all? Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Huffman never had us trapped in infinite scroll fine tuning the knobs to keep us teetering on the brink? There's some discrepancy here.

I don't see what the divide is anyways. Social media is all about things like violence, structural discrimination, sexual abuse, substance abuse. It's odd the book author is saying these are non-issues. Seems like he is taking a rather shallow view.

Also teenagers have been using the broader definition of social media for decades.

This doesn't read like science, but more importantly it is deeply flawed logic:

A person is in a car that is heading off a cliff. While they are naive of this fact, they are content but destined to an untimely demise. They are made aware of the fact and become deeply anxious.

What is causative in this scenario? Ignoring the cliff, we could say that the awareness is at fault for the person's anxiety. But if the person were better informed about their state and there was no cliff, there would be no anxiety.

A root cause analysis would show that fundamental problem is not that the driver knows where they are going, but the fact that they are headed off a cliff in the first place.

To determine that social media is the root cause of increased teenage mental illness rates, we would need to confirm that social media in a utopian environment still causes mental illness. This is a claim without much evidence, particularly because the more one becomes informed about the world the more the will be exposed to its legitimate problems. What would be more practical, then, is to determine what incidence of mental illness occurs with awareness these issues where social media is not a factor, and then to evaluate what if any factor remains to explained by social media. The editorial does not take this approach, but instead appears to attempt a firehose of rationalizations that don't converge to make a coherent thesis.

Perhaps the editorial author's book isn't selling well.

Ima go out on a limb and say treating kids like garbage probably does a lot of the heavy lifting in wrecking their minds. Also working all the adults so no-one is around to parent, and overworking and underpaying non-guardian adults like teachers.

Things like the lack of school lunches, the limit of civil rights on kids, delinquency (that is, state and federal crimes that apply to children only) and so on show that the fucks we give for children in the US are scant.

I remember when the Columbine High School shooting happened, and everyone was so eager to blame it on video games and Marilyn Manson. We make these claims because we don't want to face the consequences of the choices our society has made.

Kinda surprising given the knowledge we have that teens even want to use it.

I hope the next generation of teenagers think social media is cringe boomer shit (because now, it basically is).

This is an editorial article on a moral philosophy essay site. It's not science news

Context: John Haidt recently published a book called The Anxious Generation. I have not read it, but it has been critiqued as being too reductionist and too strict in its interpretation of the issue, as well as too alarmist.

He seems very defensive in this rebuttal. I encourage everyone to read the Nature article he is responding to. Again, I haven’t read the book, but this article is just contributing to my suspicions that maybe his work is more flawed than he’d like to admit.

He recently went semi-viral via The Wall Street Journal and the right seems to be latching on to him pretty hard for a “personal responsibility” argument as well.

His second point in his rebuttal is particularly eyebrow raising.

Context: John Haidt recently published a book called The Anxious Generation. I have not read it, but it has been critiqued as being too reductionist and too strict in its interpretation of the issue, as well as too alarmist.

He seems very defensive in this rebuttal. I encourage everyone to read the nature article he is responding to. Again, I haven’t read it, but this article is just contributing to my suspicions that maybe his work is more flawed than he’d like to admit.

Doesnt benefit the geezers too nuch either

It's not not social media... But also it's the parents, which are also affected by how the ruling class treats the entire planet. Oh, and climate change looks like a load of not fun.